Notes on “The British Labour Movement and the Trade Union Congress”[1]

Published:Proletary, No. 23, October 31 (18), 1905.

      Published according to the text inProletary.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1972,

      Moscow,Volume 9,

      page413.Translated:The Late Abraham Fineberg and Julius KatzerTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Thisis how the matter stood: the Taff Vale Railway sued the railway workers’
union for losses caused by the strike. Despite bitter resistance by the workers,
the bourgeois judges awarded damages to the capitalists! Court injunctions
instructing trade unions to compensate the capitalists for losses caused by a
strike means in fact destroying the right to strike. Judges who play the lackey
to the bourgeoisie know well how to nullify even constitutionally guaranteed
liberties, when it comes to the struggle between labour and capital.

Unfortunately,the British working-class movement promises to serve
for a long time to come as a sad example of how the labour movement’s
divorcement from socialism leads of necessity to its becoming shallow
and bourgeois in character.

[1]The article “The British Labour Movement and the
Trade Union Congress” was published without the author’s signature in
No. 23 ofProletary, October 31(18), 1905. The manuscript of the
translation of this article was edited by Lenin, who attached two notes to
it—one on the Taff Vale case, mentioned in the article, and the second on
the concluding part of the article.